


bury me and fade to black

by Verbyna



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Addiction, Bad Parenting, Dysfunctional Family, Eldritch, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Love, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-24 02:35:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18160337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: When Klaus is out of his mind enough that he stops hearing voices, he comes to Ben’s room and curls up at the foot of the bed, a shell of a boy, the outline of a brother that Ben has killed for.





	bury me and fade to black

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nantes (titians)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/titians/gifts).



> for kat, who makes everything better, including this fic.
> 
> (title from mcr, because Of Course.)

i.

Ben always thought about death because he thought about Klaus; because Klaus and death are like a fish and the water around it, and the water is murky, and the metaphor never worked because Klaus is not a fish and he was always drowning. Always.

Father calls it training. He calls pushing Klaus into a crypt an exercise, like Klaus could get better at being terrified, like terror is a thing that can be harnessed from the inside. Ben is something of an expert at harnessing terrifying things and if Father would just _listen_ then Ben could tell him the truth.

(Ben would tell Klaus, if it would help him.)

The truth is rarely helpful and the truth about monsters is that they’re a fact, not a faction. They are on the other side of fights because they live there - they exist, they are hungry because everything needs to eat, they have needs because everything needs something, and the dead are the hungriest of all because they know what it’s like to be sated.

It’s not all bad, of course. Nothing is ever all bad, or it would just become normal. Sometimes Klaus talks about helping little ghosts cross the road, or singing them to sleep and watching them cross over, or the ghosts of really smart cats who curl up at his feet in the crypt and hiss at anything that tries to come near him.

Those are monsters, too.

Even when Ben is kind, he’s still a monster. 

 

*

 

Klaus loves them all, but he loves Ben the most. This is a small distinction, but an important one, because Ben is how half the ghosts that haunt Klaus got there in the first place.

They never talk about their kill counts, but Ben keeps track, so he can tell the stories to the thing inside him and lull it to sleep. That he remembers every other death is incidental, a case of overtraining his brain to do one thing, the same as his control and the way he pretends not to notice the way Klaus has started to look at him.

(Klaus loves Ben a little more because Ben is harder to love, but this is unimportant. It won’t matter if Klaus begins to resent him.)

Hunger is the thing that makes extra room inside Klaus so he can love Ben the way he does. Plain and painfully simple, like a knife between the ribs, like the way they all go at each other in training looking for blood and how that means _I love you_ because it’s never easy. They’re supposed to protect the world but their world is each other, so that is the battlefield, too, and the only place their hunger knows.

It’s dangerous to let Klaus look. It’s selfish and cruel and smart, too, in a way that’s more clever than wise: Ben is a monster, but he wants to be more than that. He wants to be all of himself, to contain more than terror, to be a body that’s still good for something when it’s not killing. To be a fantasy, not just a nightmare, something that at least one person would reach for instead of recoiling from.

Who will know, other than the two of them? Who could possibly guess, in their grey little universe, that Klaus is even capable of wanting something other than a good night’s sleep?

 

*

 

Vanya keeps her pills in her nightstand.

Father keeps the alcohol in his study.

Klaus has ghosts that won’t come if anyone else is around, so he always knows when the coast is clear.

When Klaus is out of his mind enough that he stops hearing voices, he comes to Ben’s room and curls up at the foot of the bed, a shell of a boy, the outline of a brother that Ben has killed for. He doesn’t ask for anything, because hunger is a thing they’ve all learned to live with, but he still comes in the door swaying and relieved, glassy-eyed, as though Ben is a safe place.

Ben is not a safe place, but he can still be kind.

He wipes the makeup off Klaus’s face. He tells the thing inside him to keep watch. He sleeps lightly, so he’ll hear if Klaus starts choking, and he never tells Klaus to stop.

He will, later.

But not when he needs Klaus to trust him so Ben can feel like a person. Not when Ben is so alive that he’s seething with it, so much more than anyone can handle; not when Klaus can make Ben feel safe even though Ben’s the monster, not the child, and no one will ever know about it - this strange unnatural peace that’s mostly made up of terror.

 

*

 

When Ben dies, he can’t die entirely.

He tries, but the thing in him is not sated. It will not let him go. Ben follows it back to where it came from, only comes out sane because he grew up half-horror, and when he returns, he sees Klaus for what he really is.

The afterlife is bleak and drab and inescapable - except for Klaus, who is in full color, who is a doorway, who is a touchstone and a witness and a confessional and a beacon in the dark, who weeps and weeps and weeps when he sees Ben again for the first time, then puts on the Misfits and tells Ben what he missed while he was dimension-hopping.

 

*

 

Love is patient, Mom said once. Love is not self-seeking. Where there are prophecies, they will cease.

Ben never cared about religion any more than she did, but he thinks he gets it, now.

 

ii.

 

Klaus falls in love with a boy who lets him sleep on his floor and has a box of needles on the windowsill and a silver spoon with an ivory handle for the heroin he has brought over to his big, empty apartment.

Ben can’t say anything because Klaus is rarely sober, but he does see this:

Klaus on the bathroom floor, shaky hands and a rabbit heart and horror like a wave that comes from every corner, and

Klaus kissing the boy’s forehead at sunrise, eyes closed like a photograph, stubble on his chin and silk underwear halfway down his legs, and

Klaus in the street like he’s a ghost too, colorless already, the door almost closed, and finally

Klaus in a fur coat he bought for twenty-two dollars at a thrift store being thrown out of the apartment because he wasn’t fun anymore.

The dead should not feel surprise, but Ben has always been surprised when anyone turns Klaus away. He passes through Klaus to see if he’s right, and he is, and he hates that he is, because he did this.

He taught Klaus that one half felt fully is a whole, that a boy-image in Klaus’s head is as good as the real thing.

That death is a terror someone can live in. That it has a landscape, that some things in it are worth loving.

That a hand rubbing Klaus’s back when he’s throwing up poison means someone cares, not that someone’s scared they’ll be blamed.

But knowing what Ben knows of real horror, he doesn’t think it could’ve been any other way. Nothing can be a doorway between the living and the dead unless they’re half-dead, too. He doesn’t want to lose himself, so he doesn’t hate himself for it, but it’s the closest he ever got.

 

iii.

 

He’s not there when Klaus goes to the past and falls in love with Dave.

He is there for the aftermath.

He learns that the only thing more cruel than letting Klaus love you is to love him back, and that the shell-doorway-wounded-animal that was always his brother and sometimes more and sometimes less is, even from the outside, worth loving.

Did Ben ever know that, when he was alive?

Did it ever matter?

 

*

 

He never got to watch Klaus grieve before. Ben came back too fast and too strong, he was never really gone, and Father was not worth mourning except in the fractured, repressed way they all mourned for themselves. But Dave was real, and Dave loved Klaus back even though he had the whole world to choose from, and Klaus came back with a body count, too.

Klaus went to war.

Ben tries to imagine what war is like, but it’s very hard to make it specific. He was always bigger than the concept of war - he was worse than any war machine, more Other than any enemy, too detached and too involved. He thinks of fields left to rot in old blood and bones that no one buried and the human stench of it, the pointlessness and violence and what it would take to keep one’s head down when there is nothing under one’s skin that hungers for the release in such terrible survival.

A hill, he thinks. Two armies made up of boys who feel like flesh, and ambition like a monster in a few men who also see the boys as flesh and don’t see the hill at all. Red and brown and white and uncaring blue and the repeated image of sharp objects being plunged into something, the colors mixing, the actors forgetting their parts until they’re meat and hunger and nausea and soft gurgling noises. The borders shifting over them, the stench, the pain in worn muscles that matters more than the other kind of pain.

And then, Ben tries to imagine, coming back from it.

He was never really human, but he can’t imagine trying to be a person after that.

Klaus mourns like he was made for it, which he was. He found love, of course, in terror; in being stripped of everything but his heart, and given a meaningless target, and being told he must die for it.

Ben loves all of his siblings, but he always loved Klaus the most. When he sees Dave for the first time, he doesn’t tell him why.

He only pushes Dave to the front, makes him a little stronger. 

He only watches Klaus, who is a doorway. An open wound. A spectacle in blood and shit and filth and love and loss and everything that means _human,_ everything that can live in terror and find the one beautiful thing that makes the terror not normal.

Ben died for his siblings and came back because he couldn’t die, but staying by Klaus’s side was a choice. He makes it all the time.

It’s the only choice he ever made. The one thing he is selfish about.

 

iv.

 

The real Vanya, under the pills and the mediocrity, was the closest Ben got to a peer when they were younger.

How long did Father hope to suppress her? He wasn’t stupid; he must’ve known it would take more than tranquilizers to make her biddable. Ben wonders, after the concert, after the end of the world, if Father would’ve taught them all to repress who they were if he wasn’t trying to contain Vanya.

It bothers Ben, that no one remembers Vanya as she was. How she fought harder than any of them, how they got Mom thanks to her, how many of their bones were broken and set because she was too strong to balance out. How she would always come into their rooms and bring them glasses of water for their painkillers when Mom was busy and how they never blamed her, the same way no one blames the sun when their skin is peeling, just their own stupidity in exposing themselves without protection.

Klaus loved her second-best, because she went unnoticed. There is a bump on Klaus’ right shin that Ben remembers a bone sticking out of, but whenever Klaus wasn’t in Ben’s room he was in Vanya’s, and they were both Klaus’ home, both of them Klaus’s terror made sibling and safe.

The world will not end because Ben is dead and Vanya is finally herself again.

It will not end the way it started, with the six of them as the only thing that matters. It will not end because Klaus is a door that swings shut all the time and Five has seen a future without understanding the other futures underneath, the places Ben has seen, the dying suns and primordial gods and the simple fact that love breaks prophecy. That one single beautiful thing can keep the nightmare from becoming normal.

When Klaus swings open and calls for him, Ben comes out tentacles-first.

*

It’s an embrace.

It was never anything less.


End file.
